


Life Drawing

by collectingnames



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Beau POV, Bonding, Crushes, F/F, Life Drawing, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:00:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25363504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/collectingnames/pseuds/collectingnames
Summary: Jester asks if Beau can be a pose reference for a piece.or, the summary I was using while writing:Beau’s a big ol’ lesbian who lets her crush use her as reference for her action poses.
Relationships: Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett
Comments: 2
Kudos: 93





	Life Drawing

**Author's Note:**

> hhhhh first time writing beaujester, time to channel my Pining For My Best Friend energy. Also, I'm sure this exact scenario has been done a million times but this was the only short beaujester idea I could think of, everything else would require like, 50k words and I don't have the time to start a new 50k fic, hello there is still in progress and already owns my ass.

Beau flops facedown onto the bed, trying to convince herself to go take a shower before she drifts off and wakes up smelling nasty but quite frankly the bed is far more appealing than going down and then back upstairs to use the showers. She can just, stop for a moment, maybe meditate or something before running through the shower and promptly passing the fuck out. Oh, but maybe Caduceus has bath salts or something, yeah, he probably has bath salts. That sounds fucking great.

The door swings open, “Beau! There you are! Could you help me with something?”

She slowly picks herself up a bit so she’s awkwardly doing a push-up between the bed and the floor, “Hm? Yeah, uh, sure, what is it, Jester?”

Her enthusiasm suddenly seems tempered for a moment, “I can’t quite get the leg right.”

“The leg?”

Jester takes out her most recent sketchbook from underneath her arm and flips it open to a full-page spread she’s working on; smaller practice doodles surround a larger piece of a vaguely elven looking guy roundhouse kicking an undrawn opponent but the impact lines around one foot suggest their presence. It’s a pretty rough sketch, still just roughing out the body, there aren’t any clothes on it yet (and she can make out where a cartoon dick was hastily erased), and the leg planted to the ground has been scribbled over. The little angry cartoon Jester fuming at the offending leg looks ready to stab it, or maybe tear up the page and be done with it.

“Looks pretty good so far, Jes, don’t know what you need my help with,” Beau pushed herself all the way back up to standing to put herself at less of an awkward angle.

“Can I use you as a reference? I just need to get this leg right; it shouldn’t take long. I don’t know if you’re busy or need to do…,” Jester offered the out.

“No, no, I can do it,” she brushed herself down, more a nervous tick than actually trying to clean herself off, before wandering over to an empty bit of floor in their shared room where she’d have enough room to pose.

“Thank youuuu,” Jester pulls up a chair and sits down cross-legged to watch while she gets in position, the jingle bell hanging from her tail tingles softly behind her as her tail ticks back and forth while she concentrates.

She gets into the pose for a roundhouse kick easy enough, “This good?”

“Can you face me?”

Before she can double-think herself she hops on her grounded foot until she’s facing Jester, “Better?”

“Do you mind taking off your,” she pauses to argue with herself in her head if her old vestments are more of a jacket or a vest, “vest? It’s kinda curling forward around your leg.”

“Sure,” she shrugs it off and lets it pool on the ground, “Better?”

“Much better,” she pulls out the pencil tucked between into the ring that holds the jingle bell on her horn.

The pose isn’t particularly challenging for her to hold. It’s more keeping the pose that’s hard. She doesn’t have to stay _completely_ still, Jester only needs her leg for a few minutes, but moving one part of her body just shifts the rest. There’s no way to only move one thing, someone who wasn’t Dairon and therefore hadn’t held her attention long enough to remember their face, had told her back when she was deep in her training. Ah shit, her nose is itchy. Jester is completely absorbed in trying to copy down the lithe muscle of her leg onto the paper so she tries sticking her jaw out to blow on her nose, get the itch to go away, only succeeds in blowing some of her loose hair back up into her face. Still, could be worse, could be a painting. Gods, fuck paintings. Well, no, maybe not ‘fuck paintings’, Jester’s a fucking pro with paint, she just never wants to sit for another portrait for as long as she lives.

“Um,” Jester pauses, the scratch of her pencil on the page stops.

“Hm?”

“Nothing I just, wow, I really fucked up the knee trying to just picture it in my head,” Jester really goes at it with the eraser.

“Knees are so fucking weird.”

“What?”

“I mean, have you ever stopped and just, stared at a knee? Bodies look so fucking weird when you just think about them on their own. Like, imagine if you’d never seen a person before and all of a sudden you saw like, just a regular dude. That would be some freaky shit,” she rambles on with the thought.

Jester smirks down at the page while she listens to the tangent. She squirms in her chair a little while she works, and it makes her hair fall a little from where it’s done half-up to keep it out of her face. And she notices it again, a weird little thing where she can’t be sure if she’s right or just seeing patterns where there aren’t any. But she’d swear on her gauntlets that Jester’s freckles are constellations. She’d have to find a book of star-charts and she doesn’t quite have Caleb’s memory but she’s pretty fucking sure she saw a constellation in Nicodranas one night that looked almost exactly like Jester’s freckles.

Of course, she’d try to put Jester in the stars, try to elevate her past her own god. Not that he’s an actual god anyway. With Travellercon and everything, she’s really proven to be the brains of that whole operation. The Traveller just lucked out and happened to be an archfey. Jester could’ve been a god twice over if she’d been in his position. She probably wouldn’t _want_ to be but the point stands. 

“Beau!” Jester’s voice finally pierces through her thoughts.

“Hm? What’s up? Do I need to move?”

“No,” she holds out the sketchbook to her so she can see, “done! Just needed your leg.”

‘ _Just needed your leg.’_ No, well, okay there is a leg there now, but she also went back and skimmed over the rest of the sketch, tweaked it here and there to be her. It’s, holy shit, she knows Jester’s a good artist but seeing the flourishes of her style in the way she draws their friends is always cool to look at. The way she always draws her with bold, flourishing lines. How she put some motion into it by making her ponytail whip back and forth with either movement or an imaginary wind. And the quick, thin lines that convey the lithe muscles in her arms and legs.

“You changed it.”

“I, well, I was already using you as a reference. It was pretty easy to change the rest of the body real quick to be you. It looks cooler this way, anyways,” she stows the pencil back away in her horn jewelry.

“It looks dope, man. Way better than portraits.”

Jester laughs, “Yeah, what’s wrong with portraits though?”

“My dad made me sit for a portrait once. It was fucking bullshit. That was back before he decided I was a lost cause. I bet he burned that shit,” she leaned over the back of the chair to watch over her shoulder while she flipped through pages.

“We should’ve beat him up,” she says matter-of-factly.

“Not much point burning a scorched bridge,” she reaches over her shoulder to point out a very rough sketch she can just tell is her and Fjord training, probably on the roof from the little, well, not fully drawn out, more just, the suggestion of various plants around their feet, “Oh that’s cool, you made our fists really cool, like, the knuckles? I don’t know. I don’t really know how to complement art. Just, it’s cool.”

“Thanks, you’re really fun to draw, you’re super flexible, you can do so many cool poses! I can do maybe like, half of them. It’s so cool watching how you move because it’s just like!” she emphatically gestures while looking for her words, “Thinking about how I would draw that and imagining how all the bones and muscles and stuff all go together! You’re really cool, Beau…”

“You could train with us,” she blurts out.

“Huh?”

“Well, uh, if you trained with us, I could teach you some of those moves,” she stands back up straight, so they aren’t so close anymore, ends up missing the slight magenta blush that rises in the tips of her ears.

Jester turns in the chair, bringing one leg up onto the seat and curling her arm over the back of it, chin propped up on said arm, “It sounds _super_ fun.”

“Wish Fjord had that attitude,” Beau takes another step back to sit down on the edge of the bed.

“Well, you’re like, making him run miles at dawn and stuff and you’re showing me stretches and stuff.” Jester’s tail starts to flick playfully behind her, “ _Beauuuuu_ , are you playing favorites?”

“No,” it begins to dawn on her that she’d planned to go wash up before Jester came in and that she’d been crowding in over her shoulder all sweaty and gross and Jester could probably tell how bad she smelled right now and well, shit.

“Good! Because I can totally kick your butt!”

She smiles at that, warmth starting to glow in her chest, “I know, Jes.”


End file.
